Friday, March 13, 2015

Limits to Growth

The Club of Rome was formed in 1968.It included big shots and experts from 25
nations.Social and environmental
challenges had grown beyond the ability of individual countries to manage.It was time to study the big issues, and
develop strategies for dealing with them.Their research began with the Project on the Predicament of Mankind.

In 1972, Limits
to Growth was published, authored by Donella Meadows, Jorgen
Randers, and Dennis Meadows.(Here
is a free PDF of the book.)They
developed a computer model that allowed them to tinker with variables like
population, food, pollution, and resources, and create possible scenarios for
the coming decades.This allowed them to
understand which variables were best for leveraging desired improvements.

The book concluded that we were on a path to big trouble, but
it was not too late to avert disaster. World
leaders did not leap to action, so 20 years later the second edition was
published, Beyond the
Limits.It announced that
humankind was beyond overshoot, and it was time to slow down.Despite millions of copies sold, consumers kept
consuming, and leaders kept snoozing.In
2004, the third edition was published, Limits
to Growth — The 30-Year Update, the subject of this review.

All three books present two very important ideas.First, our planet is finite, so economic and
population growth cannot continue forever.There are limits to growth.Nothing could be more obvious to anyone who has more than two brain
cells, but our culture stubbornly refuses to accept this.It is impossible to ever have enough.We are hell-bent on perpetual growth, by any
means necessary, at any cost.Sorry,
kids!Even the most prestigious
universities on Earth remain hotbeds of the perpetual growth cult, which is the
equivalent of the flat Earth cult of centuries past.

Second, humans have moved beyond the limits.We are currently on a path that cannot
continue for more than a generation or two.Sorry, kids!Exponential
population growth continues, and exponential growth in
resource consumption is growing even faster.Climate is becoming unstable.Cropland
is being destroyed.Rivers and aquifers
are being drained.Forests are
vanishing.Fossil energy is finite.And so on.There are no silver bullet solutions, but there are countless ways to weaken
the monster.

Naturally, the perpetual growth cult is yowling and screeching.They denounce the Limits to Growth research, asserting
that the “predictions of the future” were wildly inaccurate, and therefore all
of their ideas are pure balderdash.Of
course, those who have actually read the book(s) know that the authors were careful
to repeatedly remind readers that the various possible scenarios of the future
were not
predictions.

So, there are limits to growth, and we are beyond the limits
— this begs the question: what next?The
hurricane of predicaments that comprise humankind’s war on the planet is
enormously complex.We have countless
options, and the better ones include slowing down, consuming less, fewer kids.With regard to what next, the book gets
fuzzier.

The intended audience is not the billion hungry souls living
on less than two dollars a day.The
authors are writing to the educated, wealthy elite — folks who will yowl and
screech if anyone makes a move toward their air conditioner, refrigerator, or vehicle.They cannot wrap their heads around the
notion that life can be both pleasant and sustainable, because sustainability
implies terrible sacrifice, an unbearable reduction of their precious
high-status, high-waste standard of living.

Because this elite audience is jittery and spooked, the
discussion becomes more acrobatic and dubious.For example, “A global transition to a sustainable society is probably
possible without reductions in either population or industrial output.”Not all growth is bad.Poor folks need some growth so they can
escape from poverty, and discover the magic of family planning.

Of the ten scenarios presented in the book, only one results
in a sustainable future, which is inhabited by eight billion happy humans.This scenario includes the highest number of
major changes.In it, “the system brings
itself down below its limits, avoids an uncontrolled collapse, maintains its
standard of living, and holds itself very close to equilibrium.”

Our predicaments have been accumulating for centuries.The Agricultural Revolution sharply disturbed
our relationship with the family of life, and the Industrial Revolution greatly
magnified these imbalances.Consequently, it’s time for the Sustainability Revolution.The book mentions three ways of contemplating
sustainability.

Most well known is the Brundtland Report, which defines
sustainable development as “…development that meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs.”It fails to point out the huge difference
between wants and needs.Needs are about
the basic necessities for survival: food, clothing, and shelter.Consumers often perceive needs as everything
money can buy.

Another approach is the Herman Daly Rules.(1) Renewable resources such as fish, soil,
and groundwater must be used no faster than the rate at which they
regenerate.(2) Nonrenewable resources
such as minerals and fossil fuels must be used no faster than renewable
substitutes for them can be put into place.(3) Pollution and wastes must be emitted no faster than natural systems
can absorb them, recycle them, or render them harmless.

The Daly Rules are clearer, and they imply backing away from
industrial society and traditional agriculture, which is rational and daunting.His second rule is perplexing.It’s OK to use energy and minerals to make
solar panels, but what would we need electricity for?Rule two would seem to prohibit using energy
and minerals to make computers or refrigerators, because they are not
renewable, and they require the existence of a vast and unsustainable
industrial society.Readers are warned that
a sustainable society “would be almost unimaginably different from the one in
which most people now live.”

The authors favor a third approach to sustainability, the
Ecological Footprint model, which compares the impact of human activities to
the planet’s carrying capacity.They
calculated that humankind’s current footprint requires an area 1.2 times the
Earth — we have exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity by twenty percent, and
this is unsustainable.The footprint is
defined as “the total area of productive land and water ecosystems required to
produce the resources that the population consumes and assimilate the wastes
that the population produces, wherever on Earth that land and water may be
located.”The footprint model is vague
and imprecise.

The scenarios in the book are based on measurable variables,
like cropland area, industrial output, energy reserves, population, and so
on.They do not include unknowns like
war, floods, earthquakes, epidemics, and climate instability.

A serious weakness in their computer model is the assumptions
used to project crop yields.Nine
billion could be fed in 2100 if cropland area was not diminished, if food
production doubled worldwide, if degraded land was restored, if erosion did not
increase, if irrigation capacity did not diminish, and if there was adequate
energy and fertilizer.These assumptions
are impossible to take seriously.Agriculture is highly unsustainable already.

No book provides the solutions we wish for — a healthy
future, with a high standard of living, quickly achieved via easy, painless
changes.Limits to Growth is a classic, and it
takes a unique approach to describing our predicaments, and evaluating
responses to them.It’s nourishing brain
food, easy to read, and a bit sugarcoated.